Category Archives: Al Qaradawi

One of the most influential Muslim Brotherhood spiritual leaders called on Egyptians to rise up against the army for removing President Mohamed Morsi – a Muslim Brotherhood member – earlier this month.

Sheikh Yusuf al-Qaradawi made his comments Sunday on Al Jazeera, the Middle East Online news service reports. “if he, who has disobeyed the ruler, does not repent, then he must be killed,” Qaradawi said, citing Quranic passages. “There is a legitimate ruler (in reference to Morsi) and people must obey and listen to him.”

He did not name anyone specifically, Middle East Online notes, but his comments seemed focused on army commander Abdel Fattah al-Sisi, who forced Morsi from office July 3, one year after Egyptians elected him. The move followed historic street protests by Egyptians who felt betrayed by Morsi’s leadership, seeing him more concerned with consolidating power for Islamists than in addressing Egypt’s critical economic crisis and other challenges.

But Qaradawi saw no cause to remove Morsi. “Who made you the general commander of the military?” he asked. “Who made you the minister of defence? It’s the same president you have removed who elevated you. You swore to obey him and you went against your word, which is haram [forbidden] in Islam.”

That comments amount to a call for assassination, analysts told Middle East Online.

It’s just part of a campaign of heated rhetoric and incitement from the Muslim Brotherhood. Dozens of people have died in skirmishes since Morsi’s ouster ,including 12 people on Tuesday. More than 50 people died when Muslim Brotherhood members surrounded the army’s Republican Guard headquarters July 8. A book found in the aftermath urged people to wage jihad against their foes.

This week, Essam el-Erian, vice president of the Brotherhood’s Freedom and Justice Party, called on pro-Morsi protesters to besiege the U.S. Embassy in Cairo.

Al-Sisi, meanwhile, called for protests of his own by “every honorable and honest Egyptian” to “show your size and steadfastness in the face of what is going on.”

Qaradawi lives in Qatar, the Gulf State which owns Al Jazeera. His program, “Shariah and Life,” is among the network’s most popular. Al Jazeera is about to launch its new American channel. Qaradawi’s comments mark the latest troubling episode about the nature of the channel’s programming. More than 20 staffers quit in the wake of Morsi’s removal, citing the network’s bias for the Muslim Brotherhood.

The Jerusalem Center for Public Affairs (JCPA) has published a nice summary of Global Muslim Brotherhood leader Youssef Qaradawi’s recent visit to Gaza and titled “Sheikh Qaradawi’s Visit To Gaza” ” The JCPA report begins:

May 14, 2013 Sheikh Yusuf Qaradawi, president of the International Union of Muslim Scholars, visited Gaza on May 7-10 at head of an entourage of 45, including senior officials of the organization. In the past, Qaradawi was a candidate for leadership of the Muslim Brotherhood, and over the years he has acquired the status of spiritual leader of this movement and of its Palestinian branch, Hamas.

Qaradawi received a warm welcome, especially from the Hamas leadership. They saw the visit as an important affirmation, by the longstanding and supreme religious authority of the Sunni Muslim world, of Hamas’ rule in Gaza. The visit affirmed Hamas as a faithful exponent of the Palestinian people and the jihadist enterprise, aimed at conquering the State of Israel and making it part of the Islamic state of Palestine – eventually to be one of the provinces of the Islamic caliphate whose capital will be Jerusalem.

Qaradawi’s visit was extensively covered in the Hamas government’s media, which again highlighted the ‘sheikh of jihad’s’ (as Hamas Prime Minister Ismail Haniyeh called him) backing for this Palestinian movement.

On May 10, the headline of the official Hamas daily Falastin was worded in that spirit: ‘Qaradawi calls for liberating the soil of Palestine.’ The subhead was a quotation of the most important statement he made: ‘We will never concede Palestine and we will never recognize Israel.’

During the visit, Qaradawi set forth his political outlook, thereby offering a sort of vision for the future (as well as a sort of last will and testament, given his advanced age (86) and his own recent remark that his days are numbered). The following are the main tenets of that outlook:”

Qaradawi made comments in which he denied Israel’s right to exist and waxed enthusiastically about Hamas rocket fire into Israel.

We also reported that during Qaradawi’s visit, the Egyptian Muslim Brotherhood held its first ever anti-Israel rally since coming to power, surely no coincidence and likely an attempt to avoid being upstaged by Qaradawi.

Saudi Prince Alwaleed bin Talal (center) with the “Supreme Advisory Board” of Al Risala TV in December 2012. The board includes Muslim Brotherhood figure and al Qaeda-linked financier Omar Abdullah Naseef (to the left of Alwaleed, I believe), at whose home this photo was taken. The occasion was Al Risala’s receipt of an award for excellence. Part-owner Rupert Murdoch was not in attendance.

Ever since Al Gore sold Current TV to Al Jazeera, the network founded and funded by the oil-rich emirate of Qatar, the former vice president has drawn continuous fire in conservative media. Fox News, the New York Post and the Wall Street Journal, for example, have all castigated Gore, a man of the left and leading avatar of “global warming,” for such hypocrisies as timing the deal to avoid lefty tax hikes and bagging $100 million in greenhouse-gas money.

These same news outlets share something else in common: They all belong to Rupert Murdoch’s News Corp. That means they also belong to Saudi Prince Alwaleed bin Talal.

Alwaleed owns the largest chunk of News Corp. stock outside the Murdoch family. Shortly after his purchase of 5.5 percent of News Corp. voting shares in 2005, Alwaleed gave a speech that made it clear just what he had bought. As noted in The (U.K.) Guardian, Alwaleed told an audience in Dubai that it took just one phone call to Rupert Murdoch – “speaking not as a shareholder but as a viewer,” Alwaleed said – to get the Fox News crawl reporting “Muslim riots” in France changed to “civil riots.”

This didn’t make the “Muslim” riots go away, but Alwaleed managed to fog our perception of them. With a phone call, the Saudi prince eliminated the peculiarly Islamic character of the unprecedented French street violence for both the viewers at home and, more significantly, for the journalists behind the scenes. When little owner doesn’t want “Muslim” rioting identified and big owner agrees, it sets a marker for employees. Alwaleed’s stake, by the way, is now 7 percent.

We can only speculate on what other acts of influence this nephew of the Saudi dictator might have since imposed on Fox News and other News Corp. properties. (I have long argued that News Corp. should register as a foreign agent, due to the stock owned by a senior member of the Saudi ruling dynasty.) Alwaleed hasn’t shared any other editorial exploits with the public. But that opening act of eliminating key information from News Corp.’s coverage of Islamic news might well have set a pattern of omission.

Recently, such a pattern of omission in News Corp.’s coverage of the Gore-Al Jazeera deal seems evident. I say “seems,” because I can’t be entirely certain that I haven’t missed something in my research. But judging from online searches of news stories and audio transcripts, two salient points are missing from at least the main body of News Corp.’s coverage.

One is reference to the noticeable alignment of Al Jazeera with the Muslim Brotherhood, the global Islamic movement whose motto is, “The Quran is our law; jihad is our way; dying in the way of Allah is our highest hope.” The second (with an exception noted below) is reference to Al Jazeera’s superstar host and ideological lodestar, Yusuf al-Qaradawi, a leading Muslim Brotherhood figure. The influence of al-Qaradawi at the network and in Qatar – where, according to Freedom House’s 2012 press report, it is against the law for journalists to criticize the Qatari government, the ruling family or Islam – can hardly be overestimated.

Strange omission? This relationship between the Qatari-controlled network and the Muslim Brotherhood organization has been observed for years. Back in 2007, for example, Steven Stalinsky reported in the New York Sun that various Arab commentators referred to Al Jazeera as “the Muslim Brotherhood channel” and the like. What’s more, reference to the relationship appears at least in passing in coverage of the Gore deal at mainstream media sites such as USA Today and the Seattle Times. More discussion is available at some conservative outlets, including Rush Limbaugh and The Blaze. (Searches at Breitbart and the Washington Examiner, like News Corp. sites, yielded nothing on these same points. Call it, perhaps, “the Fox effect.”)

Given the rise of Muslim Brotherhood parties in the revolutions of the so-called Arab Spring – undeviatingly cheered on by Al Jazeera – the network’s Muslim Brotherhood connection, which extends to Al Jazeera’s sponsors inside the Qatari ruling family, is a crucial point to miss. Especially when it seems to be missed across the board.

The same goes for failing to mention Al Jazeera’s leading personality, Yusuf al-Qaradawi, in the Gore deal coverage. This longtime “spiritual guide” of the Muslim Brotherhood hosts one of Al Jazeera’s most popular shows, “Shariah and Life.” Among other poisonous pronouncements, al-Qaradawi has called for Americans in Iraq and Israelis everywhere to be targeted by terrorists (“martyrs”) who would then find a place in Islamic paradise. Given Al Gore’s refusal to sell his network to Glenn Beck’s The Blaze TV due to political differences, Muslim Brother Al-Qaradawi and his Shariah ideology become highly relevant. Then again, maybe one man’s news story is just another man’s clipping on the cutting-room floor.

Meanwhile, the one story I found in News Corp. coverage of the Gore deal that mentions al-Qaradawi – a column by Gordon Crovitz – neglected to note al-Qaradawi’s place in the Muslim Brotherhood. Particularly given current events, this is a little like forgetting to mention that Hermann Goring was in the Nazi Party.

Could normal editorial discretion or plain ignorance be at work here? I suppose so. Still, there is that tie-in between News Corp. and the House of Saud to consider, a partnership I find more troubling than Gore’s deal with the Qatari emirate. Not only does Alwaleed own a stake in News Corp., Murdoch owns an even more substantial stake (18.97 percent) in Alwaleed’s Arabic media company Rotana.

Within the Alwaleed-Murdoch-Rotana galaxy is a 24-hour-Islamic outlet called Al Risala, which Alwaleed founded in 2006. The channel’s director and popular “tele-Islamist” is Tareq Al-Suwaidan, widely reported to be a leader of the Muslim Brotherhood in Kuwait. The station’s “Supreme Advisory Committee” includes Abdullah Omar Naseef, who, according to former federal prosecutor Andrew C. McCarthy, is “a major Muslim Brotherhood figure” involved in the financing of al-Qaida.

Al Risala, then, would seem to fit right into the Al Jazeera-Qaradawi-Muslim-Brotherhood lineup.

We know Alwaleed has influenced Fox editorial matters before. Could that Alwaleed influence – even his very presence – account for why News Corp. hasn’t hit harder on the Muslim Brotherhood and al-Qaradawi angles of the Gore-Jazeera deal?